Backpackers and others not interested in glitzy beaches or teeming crowds have embraced Chiapas for years. So have people who want to mingle among the Mayans, soaking up their ages-old culture.
A vast stretch of greenery in southeastern Mexico, it is caressed by clouds that march across its mountains and slice through San Cristobal de Las Casas, its reclusive mountaintop heart, a compact city of red-tile roofs and the cobblestoned ambience of an old Spanish colonial town.
But we are not here to ogle nature or to search among the stalls in San Cristobal's markets or to explore for the various kinds of amber mined nearby.
This is a "reality tour," an adventure into being socially responsible and finding meaning in a foreign place others might turn away from in fear or despair or simple lack of interest.
Participants in these tours - which evolved from the ecotourism of the 1970s - often visit the world's less fortunate, rebuilding old houses or building new ones, working in medical clinics, teaching in schools, or sometimes just dancing or singing or listening to their music while paying attention to tales of their lives.
At least a dozen groups in the United States offer reality tours, some more politically charged than others, and some focusing more on cultural than economic differences.
"Socially responsible travel is not only socially just - it is good business," says the brochure sent to me by Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human-rights organization with a leftist inclination that has provided reality tours for 16 years to countries (the United States included) around the globe. The "good business" is the money that goes to local people and businesses that need it.
Other handouts tell me that the person leading my tour will be a program coordinator and an expert in her field, not a so-called tour guide; that I should be mindful of my fellow travelers' differences in age, race and social class; that I should try to eat as much food as is served in the villages we visit because in a "climate of scarcity it is rude to waste food"; and, ultimately, that I should think of ways of overcoming the image of the "boorish and arrogant" American tourist.
About 40 percent of Global Exchange's reality-tour travelers come from academic institutions, and the rest are largely professionals or retirees. Women account for nearly two-thirds of the travelers.
For $750 I get an eight-night tour, housing (two to a room or $150 extra for a single room), two meals daily, transportation to the villages, and transfers back and forth to the nearest airport in Tuxtla Gutierrez.
Our adventure begins at the Posada Carmelita, a small, newly opened inn on a quiet street in San Cristobal. The rooms are clean, the water incredibly hot, and Carmen, who opened the inn a year ago with her daughter Carmelita, cooks a different breakfast specialty daily, then cheerfully wanders our group's long dining table, dropping off freshly cooked treats from the kitchen of her nearby home.
We are 11 travelers: my photographer, Antonio Perez, and me; a businessman from Wyoming and his daughter, a freshman at Grinnell College in Iowa, who are on a family-bonding trip; a retired art teacher/artist from suburban Washington, who is intrigued with Mayan art; a middle-aged graduate student - part Chippewa, part Navajo - from George Mason University in suburban Virginia who is studying conflict resolution; and five University of California students, first-generation Mexican Americans active in Chicano issues on campus and eager to embrace their roots.
"Go into the meetings with your eyes and hearts open," says our coordinator, Eva Marie Schulte, on the first morning as we meet on a patio of the inn. Schulte came to Chiapas a decade ago, fresh from the University of Wisconsin, a Latin American studies major interested in biological conservation who thought she would spend no more than six months here.
She explains the nuances of the Mayans we will meet in the Zapatista communities. How, for example, you do not ask about people's overall mood, a concept unfamiliar to Mayans, but ask instead what is in your heart. She is warm and upbeat, an idealized Midwesterner.
For the first two days, from morning until early evening, we sit through lectures from various groups whose message is sympathetic to the Zapatistas.
Until their revolt began in 1994, we are told, the Indians' life was not much changed from the centuries they spent in slavery and poverty. The revolt gave them liberty and land - the same things sought by Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary Mexican leader killed in the early 20th century from whom their movement gets its name.
What they want now, the speakers explain, is autonomy, not permanent rebellion or a breakaway from Mexico. And since the government has not granted them what they want, they have set up their own self-governing councils, their own schools, their own primitive medical system, their own system of justice - and their own economy, based on the land that they have taken over and turned into small farming plots.
Some speakers drone on with their black-and-white messages, leaving me restless. What's the other side of things?
I wonder, too, how this will work out. Will we be able to connect with what we see and hear, or will this be an exercise in well-meaning voyeurism?
As I discover, there are moments when we do connect.
During a meeting at the offices of the Community Defenders Network, an organization the Zapatista communities set up when they realized no lawyers would defend them, a hush comes over us when Ruben Morelo, a law student and worker for the group, speaks.
"We gain our strength by knowing that we are not alone," he says. "If something happens to one of us - if I'm taken away or kidnapped - I do not worry, because I'm working for our communities, and we are not alone. And you are not alone. We are all here in this together."
Walking back to the Posada Carmelita in the darkly lit streets, Vicky Troy, who always explains she is an indigenous North American when we introduce ourselves at meetings, seems fascinated. "So this is the way they do it, the way they have justice, from the bottom up," she says.
Alfredo, the youngest of the five California students, is similarly touched. Like most of the others, he talks of his parents as immigrants who have struggled at tough, low-wage jobs, and that's a major reason, he says, why he works so hard in school and plans for a professional career. None of the five students wants his full name used or specific campus identified, for fear that contact with the Zapatistas will cause problems on campus or for relatives in Mexico.
"When he said 'you are not alone' and I looked and saw how young they are," Alfredo says, "I say to myself, this is something I do. I can do the same."
On the fourth day, we begin our trips to the countryside.
First we meet with a Zapatista regional council, which gives us permission to visit other villages. It is a rather stiff meeting where the Zapatistas wear bandanas or ski masks to conceal their identities. Next day we go to a village for displaced persons, then spend a night and a day at another village perched on an even higher mountaintop.
We do not encounter military checkpoints. The government presence seems incredibly low-key for such a long-brewing dispute. It doesn't feel that we are living dangerously, though the Zapatistas seem on alert.
(One reason for the relative calm was the decision by President Vicente Fox after his election in 2000 to defuse the conflict. But a solution remains elusive, snarled in disagreement between Mexico's politicians and the Zapatistas over a much-weakened Indian-rights measure the Zapatistas once backed. Visiting Chiapas recently, Fox described the Zapatista movement as "practically a thing of the past," a remark opposition politicians described as unreal.)
Arriving at dusk at a local Zapatista council for our overnight visit, we watch people gather for a nighttime lowering of the Mexican flag. We have dinner and settle in for the night at a large bunkhouse for visitors. Scrawled on the walls are messages from countless visitors, most apparently Europeans and clearly revolutionary-minded.
It is a large, crudely made building with only a few beds and wooden planks to spread our sleeping bags upon. One of the students has brought a guitar, so Vicky offers a Bob Dylan song, which fascinates the students, who think they've entered a time machine.
We joke until late, but my mind is stuck on a warning about rats that show up at night that I'd heard from a young Basque woman staying here for the last month.
In the morning, several roommates report that rats had fought it out on the wooden beams atop us during the night, with a couple falling on the floor beside our sleeping bags. I suspect they are kidding me. I help out with our breakfast, cutting tomatoes for omelets.
We have a meeting slated for late afternoon with the villagers, who will spend several hours with us, talking about themselves and their Zapatista experiment.
But now we are headed on foot toward a newly created village spun off by Indians from this village. They wanted their own land to farm and took over a rancher's plot. We follow a small road, then a footpath that winds through pine woods.
Breathlessly, we finally arrive at the village overlooking a distant valley. There are only a few shacks and a newly built church for the 35 families who recently claimed the land.
Wrapped in serapes against the chill and hugging their youngest children, the village women, not the men, welcome us.
But they are shy, say little, and watch us. We explain who we are. Lisette, one of the students, talks about how she and other students have been concerned about how Latino immigrants are treated in the United States. She says they are here to assert their ties to the nation where their parents came from.
We ask about their lives, and their shyness ever so slowly melts. Life is still hard, they say. No medicine. No electricity. They eat only what they grow. The children are often sick. But they have land to grow crops.
"Now, we are less ashamed," says a young mother, more outspoken than the rest. "Before, if you came here we would run away. We would be afraid. But now I see how my children have to learn how to read and write. And I see, too, that liberty is not just for the men. It is for the women too. Now we realize we have rights, too."
As we talk, I notice dew on my hands and realize a cloud has embraced us.
Returning to San Cristobal that night in a long drive made longer by a thick fog, the group has congealed enough for us to tell terrible jokes, and to mock each other for doing so.
Did I ever hear the other side, or meet anyone with a neutral view about what's been taking place in Chiapas?
No, and I wish we had.
That is on my mind at our last gathering, in a large, outdoor restaurant on the sunny edge of a river in Tuxtla Gutierrez. We've stopped on the way to the airport for lunch and to share final thoughts about the trip.
As my turn approaches, I weigh my words.
Within a few days, I had realized it was nearly impossible to have any meaningful connection with the villagers, beyond a few fleeting words and images, because of the shortness of the tour and the great gaps between us and them.
But that, I decide, doesn't take away from the tour's value.
From listening to the others, I have the sense that the tour's impact will linger. Some of us, I suspect, will be stirred toward similar trips. Some will keep the trip as a mental bookmarker, reminding them to consider the humanity as well as the lovely vistas the next time they travel. And some will have gained insight into what's happening in a distant place like the mountains of southeast Mexico.
And that's what I say when my turn comes.
Making Travel More Real
"Reality" or "socially responsible" travel is available from a number of sources offering a variety of experiences, including:
• Global Exchange. Global Exchange's next Chiapas trip will be July 6. The San Francisco-based organization has about 100 tours yearly, ranging from five days to two weeks, to 30 countries. Prices run from $650 to $2,650. It also provides custom-designed trips, volunteer-abroad experiences and helps with academic credit for some tours. Contact: 415-255-7296; www.globalexchange.org.
• The Center for Global Education, Augsburg College, Minneapolis. The center has about 50 nine- to 12-day tours as well as 10 three-month semester programs yearly. Prices range from $900 to $2,000. The focus is on Third-World countries. Contact: 1-800-299-8889; www.centerforglobaleducation.org.
• Plowshares Institute, Simsbury, Conn. This organization offers a small program with two tours annually that cost from $2,500 to $3,800. The focus is on critical issues in developing countries. Contact: 860-651-4304; www.plowsharesinstitute.org.
Note: Overseas airfare is usually not included in these groups' charges. A number of overseas volunteer programs are also listed on the Web; http://onesmallplanet.com is one site that will guide you to many of them.